The Winter Olympics & Winter Sports Quiz — 10 Free Questions

Question 1

Which American alpine skier, a slalom prodigy who won Olympic gold in the event at 18 in 2014, went on to break Ingemar Stenmark's 40-year-old record for the most World Cup race wins by any skier, man or woman?

Question 2

Which British ice dance pair, at the 1984 Sarajevo Games, skated a slow, dramatic routine to Ravel's Bolero and were awarded a perfect row of maximum artistic marks by every judge, the most famous performance in the discipline's history?

Question 3

Which Swedish alpine skier, a specialist in the slalom and giant slalom who never raced the speed events, won a record 86 World Cup races in the 1970s and 80s and took two golds at the 1980 Lake Placid Games?

Question 4

Which Canadian city hosted the 1988 Winter Games, the first to run over sixteen days and two weekends, and the stage on which both Eddie the Eagle and the first Jamaican bobsled team won the world's affection?

Question 5

Which resort in the French Alps, in the shadow of Mont Blanc, hosted the 1924 sports week that was later recognised as the first Winter Olympic Games, with events in skating, skiing, bobsled, ice hockey and curling?

Question 6

Which unlikely Winter Olympic entry, from a Caribbean country with no snow and no ice track, made its debut at the 1988 Calgary Games, crashed its four-man sled in a qualifying run, and then pushed the overturned sled across the finish line to a standing ovation?

Question 7

Which team sport was on the very first Winter Olympic programme in 1924, having actually debuted at the 1920 Summer Games, and pits six skaters a side in fast, full-contact pursuit of a hard rubber disc?

Question 8

What is the informal name for the Olympic qualification tightening brought in after the 1988 Games, requiring an athlete to place in the top half or top group at a recognised international event before they can enter, specifically to keep hopeless novices out of the competition?

Question 9

Which endurance sport, the core of the Nordic skiing tradition, has competitors propel themselves across rolling snow terrain over distances up to 50 kilometres, using either a striding classic style in set tracks or a faster skating style on groomed piste?

Question 10

Which Canadian city hosted the 2010 Winter Games, which opened under a cloud after a Georgian luger died in a training crash that morning, and closed with the host nation's men winning the ice hockey final in overtime against the United States?

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About The Winter Olympics & Winter Sports

The Winter Olympics gather the world's snow and ice sports into a single fortnight every four years, and this quiz covers the Games, their hosts and the disciplines around them in eighty questions. Each describes an edition, a champion, a sport, an event, a piece of jargon, a venue or a famous moment, and asks you to name it from four choices, then explains the story or the record behind it.

The first pack is the foundation: the Games themselves and their 1924 start at Chamonix; the sports of figure skating, alpine and cross-country skiing, the biathlon, ski jumping, the bobsled, luge and skeleton, long and short track speed skating, curling, ice hockey and snowboarding; and the moments everyone knows, the Miracle on Ice, Torvill and Dean's Bolero, Eddie the Eagle, two Games at Lake Placid, and Norway at the top of the all-time table.

The second pack fills in the detail. The champions, from Sonja Henie, Eric Heiden and Lidia Skoblikova through Bjoern Daehlie, Marit Bjoergen and Ole Einar Bjoerndalen to Lindsey Vonn, Mikaela Shiffrin, Shaun White and Yuzuru Hanyu. The host cities, Squaw Valley, Innsbruck, Sapporo, Sarajevo, Calgary, Albertville, Lillehammer, Nagano, Salt Lake City, Vancouver, Sochi, Pyeongchang, Beijing and twice-natural St Moritz. And the events and terms, the super-G, the halfpipe, the moguls, the Nordic combined, the team pursuit, the curling hammer, the ski-jump K-point, the refrigerated sliding track and the vanished compulsory figures.

The third pack is history and controversy: the Kerrigan and Harding attack; the 2002 pairs judging scandal that ended marks out of six; the McLaren Report into Russian state doping; the Jamaican bobsled team; the Eddie the Eagle qualification rule; the Battle of the Carmens; the klapskate and the ski-jumping V-style that each rewrote their sports; the death of the luger Nodar Kumaritashvili; Sidney Crosby's Golden Goal; the Kamila Valieva doping case; the hand-built Cresta Run; the sport of bandy; the Winter Paralympics; Sweden's Vasaloppet; the military patrol event that became the biathlon; Grenoble 1968; the Ailsa Craig granite in every curling stone; ski flying; and the neutral label Russia's athletes competed under.

Every answer is a single name, and the wrong options are always names of the same kind, so the game is recognition rather than recall. A few myths get cleared up: Norway, not a bigger country, leads the all-time medal count; ice hockey and figure skating both began at the Summer Games; and the 1988 Jamaican team crashed rather than triumphed. Because a photo of an athlete or a named venue usually gives the answer away, images are used only where a neutral shot of empty equipment or an unlabelled arena does not, and every fact has been checked.